kottke.org posts about SpongeBob SquarePants

This story involve: ninjas, Orange County, and SpongeBob SquarePants. Depending on who you ask, artist Todd White, lead character designer of SpongeBob SquarePants, either hired a gang of ninjas to hold hostage a gallery owner for several hours while they stole all his work from the gallery or sent his manager, his lawyer, and an off duty LAPD officer to take his art back from a gallery owner who fraudulently reproduced and signed his work.

Claiming that she had been assaulted and imprisoned, Howell told the cops that she only agreed to be recorded by the men because she was scared. "She was extremely afraid for her life," the officer noted. Terrified for her safety, according to the report she gave the police, she told Eddy and the others what they wanted to hear and signed the settlement only because she had been coerced. She suspected that the caper was designed to eliminate her from White's life and allow him -- and Lavoie, who now worked as White's office manager -- to take over her lucrative gallery themselves. Later that month, she filed a lawsuit against White seeking $7.5 million for physical and emotional trauma. The settlement she had signed that night had no merit as far as she was concerned, and she would continue her business at the Hyatt as normal.

The man who stole a drawing by the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí on Tuesday wore only the most basic of disguises: that of an everyday gallery visitor, walking past the Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst works on display. And he brought only the most basic of tools for his heist: a black shopping bag.